Ken Dixon: State may set the template for federal action

Published 6:08 pm, Friday, March 22, 2013

Say what you want about the slow pace of Connecticut's response to the Sandy Hook School massacre.

Say Democrats are giving minority Republicans too much of a platform at a time when they have crushing majorities in the House and Senate, with a Democratic governor who has an ambitious gun-control agenda that's set the bar for all to see.

Say the private meetings of the "Big 6" House and Senate leaders, now into their fourth week, are opaque to the point that murky would be a stroke of transparency.

You can't say the closed-door deliberations of legislative leaders have jumped to judgment.

After spending hours every day together for three weeks, these guys -- and they are all men -- deserve medals, or earplugs at the very least.

The hopeful side of me thinks there's a national model for gun control that will be debated and voted on within a few weeks.

"It has to be a strong, comprehensive bill," said Senate President Pro Tempore Donald E. Williams Jr., D-Brooklyn, late last week. "Yes, we would ideally like a bipartisan agreement, but it has to be a strong and comprehensive bill."

Looking at recent laws enacted in New York, Maryland and Colorado, Williams said that Connecticut's should be stronger.

Conversely, if the Legislature falls short, "then folks could say Connecticut didn't step up on assault weapons; they didn't step up on a gun registry; they didn't step up on background checks universally and even for ammunition and things like that," Williams said.

"If we can reach agreement there's no reason why they can't find common ground on some issues, whether it's universal background checks or other things," said Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield, whose district includes Newtown.

"I think that message is important for us to send. I would hope that our congressional delegation and others would take note and bring that message down to Washington and say `Look, they did it in Connecticut, the home of Newtown," McKinney said. "They sat down together, they worked out some differences. Both sides looked to compromise and we need to do that here in Washington.'"

The experienced side of me thinks there's not enough bipartisan common ground for one bill that will cover the many areas that an initial response to Dec. 14 requires.

There are a lot of Republicans -- even Democrats -- particularly from the suburban and rural areas that dominate many issues in the House and Senate, who aren't happy with what they may have to vote on, very soon.

Take the issue of ammunition magazines.

There's a fulminating impasse behind those doors over allowing current owners of magazines that hold more than 10 bullets to keep their property and to "grandfather" them in for the future.

Gun enthusiasts are worried that while they're at the barricades defending their Second Amendment rights to own military-style weapons that have no use for hunting, their Fifth Amendment rights to property may be assailed.

Don't you hate it when public safety trumps your right to own a 30-round magazine for an AR-15, one of the deadliest weapons in the world? A "well-regulated Militia," indeed.

As it's currently being discussed -- and being pressed by gun enthusiasts and their corporate backers -- magazines in use now that hold more than 10 bullets could be registered and stickers would be applied, designating the equipment as grandfathered and exempt from a ban. Stickers?

That is laughable, if it weren't so sad and illogical, since the heart of the gun-control debate after Adam Lanza's 152-shot fusillade at Sandy Hook Elementary School, with his series of 30-round magazines, is to stop the ability of someone to shoot many bullets without reloading.

That's the obvious public safety response, doing business for the tougher challenge of identifying and defusing disturbed young men like Adam Lanza before they explode into violence. If he only had 10-round magazines, how many kids would have died? Nineteen? Ten? The only thing we can say is: likely fewer.

You can't prove a negative, so I can argue here that if the tougher gun regulations had been in effect in recent years, maybe Nancy Lanza, his mother, never would have bought the Bushmaster rifle. Maybe she would have had no guns in the house. Maybe she would have gotten her troubled younger son into a mental-health program that helped him develop empathy and some social skills to connect beyond the violent fantasies of video games and the sick plotting for a mass murder.

Maybe Nancy Lanza would be alive today instead of being a footnote in one of the nation's worst mass murders.

So maybe those stickers on the grandfathered magazines could be yellow smiley faces, bull's eyes, or even green ribbons in honor of the 20 slain Sandy Hook school kids and their six administrators who were so violently gunned down by a 20-year-old mad man.